The pop-up exhibition “Arts of Intervention” brings together an international group of artists connected to the working group on “Women Mobilizing Memory” of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference in the context of the Third Annual Memory Studies Association Conference in Madrid, June, 2019.

On March 21, Columbia Global Centers | Istanbul will host Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, in conversation with Ayşe Gül Altınay, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Sabancı University and Aylin Vartanyan, Lecturer at Bogazici University. This event is organized in collaboration with SU Gender, Hrant Dink Foundation, and Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation. There will be simultaneous translation during the event.

About the Talk Responding to the renewed monumentality of memory museums, memorials and commemorative rituals that perpetuate nationalism and ethnocentrism, this talk looks at two recent memorial projects by feminist diasporic artists from different parts of the world [Mirta Kupferminc and Wangechi Muthu] projects that explore the vicissitudes and vulnerabilities of exile and statelessness. It suggests that stateless memory can open up the possibility of imagining alternative relationships between contemporary subjects and citizenship, national belonging, and home, as well as alternate temporalities of becoming.

Professor Marianne Hirsch writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective. Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010), co-authored with Leo Spitzer, and two volumes forthcoming this year: the co-edited Women Mobilizing Memory andthe co-authored School Photos in Liquid Time. The director of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, Hirsch teaches Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia.

"Collaborative Archives: Connective Histories," part of the CSSD working group Women Mobilizing Memory's Collaboration and Co-Resistance project, runs at Neiman Gallery until September 18th, 2015.

The exhibition was curated by Katherine Cohn and Isin Onol and is the manifestation of multi-year collaboration of a transnational group of artists, scholars and activists from the U.S., Chile and Turkey who study the politics of memory from the unique perspective of gender and social difference.

"Women Mobilizing Memory," a three-year working group of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, explores the politics of memory in the aftermath of the atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in comparative global perspective with unique attention to the effects of social difference. Focusing on the shaping role of gender in the structures of political violence, the working group analyzes the strategies by which women artists, scholars and activists have succeeded in mobilizing the memory of gender-based violence to promote redress, social justice, and a democratic future. Looking at gendered memory politics in several sites around the world, the group has analyzed these in a broader connective context. From the fortieth anniversary of the Chilean coup, the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, and cycles of violence against indigenous and minority peoples in Chile, Turkey and the United States, it has featured activist and future-oriented modes of representation and commemoration. At the same time, it probes the limits of comparative and connective approaches to memory politics. Based in the Humanities and the Arts, the group looks closely at the political efficacy of various media of memory, ranging from visual art, literature, journalism and performance to museums, memorials, and street actions. What role do these various media play in combatting the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions and new histories for future generations? The collaborations among the participants in the working group, their face-to-face as well as virtual meetings and their constructive conversations and disagreements, aim to create a space of solidarity and co-resistance that can lay the groundwork for a more hopeful future.